War Critic Faces Test on Iraq Spending Bill

By ROBIN TONER; Jeff Zeleny and John M. Broder contributed reporting from Washington.

Published: February 25, 2007

As Democratic Congressional leaders escalate their challenge to the Bush administration's policy in Iraq, one of the most influential players will be that unlikely darling of the antiwar left, Representative John P. Murtha of Pennsylvania.

Mr. Murtha's power comes not just from his role as chairman of the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, in charge of the huge spending bill for the war that will advance in the House in March. It also derives from his close alliance with Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and from his popularity, ever since he called for an end to the war in 2005, among the party's antiwar base -- at the grass-roots level, among liberal Internet communities, and in the House.

''He has the aura of a folk hero among the legions who want to get out of Iraq,'' said Tom Matzzie, Washington director of MoveOn.org.

Still, Mr. Murtha faces an extraordinary political challenge over the next month, and some Democrats are already worried about his handling of it. As they consider the president's nearly $100 billion spending request for military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, Democrats must find a way to satisfy an antiwar wing that wants clear progress toward winding down the war -- the Out of Iraq Caucus claims a third of the House Democrats -- while producing legislation palatable to the party's conservatives and centrists.

Mr. Murtha says he will meet with the Democratic leadership on Wednesday to talk about his plans; a spokesman for Ms. Pelosi said she had yet to sign off on any proposal. But the ideas Mr. Murtha has floated over the past month -- attaching restrictions to the financing, and requiring the Pentagon to meet clear standards on readiness, training and equipment for troops about to be deployed to Iraq -- have already drawn substantial criticism. Mr. Murtha has argued that his approach both protects American forces and makes Mr. Bush's troop buildup plan impossible to sustain.

But some Democrats said they feared that the Murtha approach could amount to Congressional overreaching, an attempt to micromanage the war. ''Congress is a blunt instrument,'' said Representative Joe Sestak of Pennsylvania, a retired admiral and a critic of the war, who added that he had the ''greatest respect'' for Mr. Murtha but was ''wary.''

''There may be unknown ramifications, unintended unknown ramifications, when you get on the operational level,'' Mr. Sestak said.

Republicans say Mr. Murtha is leading a stealthy effort to cut financing for the troops. ''When you hamstring the Pentagon with burdensome standards and hold the funding over the Pentagon's head, that's somewhere between irresponsible and dangerous,'' said Brian Kennedy, spokesman for Representative John A. Boehner of Ohio, the Republican leader. And Vice President Dick Cheney took repeated shots at Mr. Murtha and Ms. Pelosi this week while traveling in Japan.

Back home in his district, Mr. Murtha, a 33-year veteran of the House, stole a few days away from the political maelstrom. Every inch the traditional congressman from Western Pennsylvania, he paid tribute to the Boy Scouts at a dinner Thursday and vowed to keep fighting for organized labor at a breakfast on Friday. He rarely mentioned his opposition to the war in his public remarks, although he told local reporters he believed that sometime over the next few months, Congressional Democrats would reach some compromise with the White House on Iraq.

For all of President Bush's vows to pursue his policies in Iraq, Mr. Murtha argued, ''They can't continue this direction.

''They can say that, just like they said they weren't going to fire Rumsfeld two weeks before the election,'' he added, referring to the dismissal of Donald H. Rumsfeld as defense secretary immediately after the election. ''But in the end, you can't sustain a war if you don't have public support.''

Of Mr. Cheney's remarks, Mr. Murtha said, ''They're striking out because they have no answers.''

Mr. Murtha has his critics, but he has an enormously powerful friend in Ms. Pelosi, a political relationship of which House Democrats are keenly aware. Mr. Murtha said Ms. Pelosi had ''the best political mind of any speaker I've dealt with'' and was a better speaker for the quick-response era of modern politics than even ''my mentor, Tip O'Neill.''

Ms. Pelosi has returned the favor, often telling colleagues that Mr. Murtha's decision to oppose the war in the fall of 2005 transformed the debate and helped the Democrats recapture the House. ''She's said it on more than one occasion,'' said Representative John B. Larson of Connecticut, a vice chairman of the Democratic caucus. Mr. Murtha's shift on the war carried special weight; he is a Vietnam veteran and retired Marine colonel, and one of the House's most respected members on military matters.

The proof of Ms. Pelosi's loyalty came when she backed Mr. Murtha in his failed campaign to become majority leader. And she defended him again last week, when he was widely criticized for granting a lengthy online interview to MoveCongress.org, an antiwar group, just when House Democrats were trying to build a bipartisan majority on the nonbinding resolution against Mr. Bush's troop buildup.

Organizers said they conducted that interview to reassure antiwar activists that Democrats would not stop with a nonbinding resolution, which many on the left believed was too little, too late. But Representative Walter B. Jones, a North Carolina Republican who backed the resolution, said Mr. Murtha's interview had scared some Republicans who were against the troop increase.

Republican leaders seized on the interview, Mr. Jones said, and used it to hold the line. ''If he had made his comments after the vote, we could have picked up five to eight more Republicans,'' Mr. Jones said.

That episode underscores the broader challenge facing House Democratic leaders. Representative James P. Moran, a Virginia Democrat, said Mr. Murtha needed to pay attention not only to anxious centrists and moderates, who are worried that he will go too far, but also to antiwar Democrats who have promised ''that they will not vote for one more dollar for support for Iraq.''

Mr. Moran added, ''If we get hit from both the left and the right, it may be problematic.''

In the end, Democratic leaders were counting on Murtha the legislator as much as Murtha the folk hero. ''He's a realist, and he's trying to find a majority on the House floor,'' said one House Democratic strategist.

Mr. Murtha said, ''We're working our way through this,'' but he argued that time -- and public opinion -- were inexorably on his side.

Photo: John P. Murtha spent a few days out of the political fray last week in his home district in Pennsylvania. (Photo by Bob Fritz for The New York Times)